Our issue is the role that stress plays in the lives of students. Stress is a huge part of our everyday lives and is often seen as a fact of nature. It is defined as any type of force in the outside world that affects the individual physically, mentally and behaviorally. Every person responds to stress differently according to their past experiences and current management. Students experience stress on a daily basis whether it is from their classes, social lives, family lives, or expectations that they may have for themselves. Stress has proven to become a big issue in the lives of students. Many schools participate in stress management techniques to guide their students into a more stress free environment. More schools should be participating in stress management sessions because many students even up to their years in high school do not know the proper way to manage or cope with stress. The majority of schools that are participating in teaching students stress management techniques are elementary and middle school, which allows the students to learn early on in life how to manage stress. What about the high schools students and college students? These are the students that seem to be under the most amount of stress, but yet it is often hard to find stress management techniques offered for free to these students. As a group we wanted to research the main issues of stress such as their causes, management techniques, and both positive and negative effects. We wanted to focus on students of all grade levels as a whole due to the similarities in causes of stress between these grade levels.
II. Research Summary
The section of our research for this project which I focused on was what causes students to stress, mainly within the school system. There is no doubt that students stress, the difference is that everyone stresses differently and has their own way of dealing with it. The articles that I used for this research project mainly focused on the causes of stress, and why these stress simulators are causing students to stress. The editorial article I found focused mainly on the causes of stress from tests, family, jobs, peer pressure, school related issues, etc. It also touched upon the fact that the root of stress is caused by the environment which the student is becoming stressed in. This article also expressed how stress for students is mainly due to the fact that they are trying to balance academic and social demands from school. The NY Times magazine article that I found talked about how stress within school is mainly caused by long school days/ classes, and over crowded classrooms. It also explained how many students are becoming more stressed in some cases than their parents and also that they are learning to stress from their parents. In the scholarly article explained how researchers are now using student stress surveys and other forms of evaluations to research and determine what causes someone to stress. This article also talked about how freshmen are the key group who are prone to stress because they are transitioning into a new environment. The summary- ERIC- which I used explained how not all students experience the same negative thoughts and feelings when stress, and how this is related to what is causing a student to stress as well. The final article/summary which I was allow to freely choose was about how the impact of more homework in school and the demand of honorary activities (such as the honor roll) are really causing students to become stressed. This article talked about some specific examples of what is being done to reduce the stress on these students.Kristin Orabone
My section of research focused on the effective management of stress used by students and teachers. The articles that I have chosen to summarize mostly focus on the suggested strategies students are supposed to use to combat the stress they feel. It is evident to anyone who has been a student; school is a very stressful time. Sometimes students either don’t know how or don’t want to spend time trying to relieve their stress, which ends up in a situation that is not beneficial to the student. My opinion article was written by a Syracuse University student who believed that the typical stress relieving strategies did not seem to work on the average college student. Instead, the author reported that he had found that most students he knew would rather punch something than take a peaceful walk. The article I found from Newsweek reported that a middle school in the Washington D.C. area was implementing a meditation strategy to help prevent further violent behavior. In this article it was mentioned that many studies have found that meditation provides students with a better sense of self and resulted in less bullying and higher test scores. Another article also supports the idea of teaching students healthy stress relieving strategies was found in NEA Today and it described the different ways teachers helped their students get rid of their stress. From yoga before tests to bringing coloring books for after, teachers found that even the smallest change will help students to alleviate their stress. An ERIC digest article described the reasons students might feel overwhelmed or stressed, as well as ways to help students reduce the stress they may be feeling. One suggestion in this article that has been found to be helpful was to reduce the feeling of one’s helplessness over one’s own academic performance. If students feel that their success is in their own hands, it has been found that they will feel less stressed out. In the second ERIC digest article that I summarized, it described the different ways (either positive or negative) in which gifted students can handle their stress. Such positive ways were going for a run or making to-do lists, and negative ways of handling stress were escaping through drugs and alcohol or setting one’s standards very low to avoid failing. Overall, the articles all had the same message: there are helpful and destructive ways to handle stress, each person has a different way of dealing with their stress, but there are some ways that are proven to just make matters worse. Virginia Kreger
My section of research focused on the affects that stress has in the lives of students. The different health issues associated with the affects of stress emphasize just how important an issue, stress is for students. The articles that I used for my research paper mainly focus on some sort of affect that stress has caused either on people as a whole or specifically children or young adults. The summary article that I used from ERIC proved to be helpful when trying to figure out if there was any significant difference in the affects of stress for young adults as opposed to children; it also was the only article that talked about some positive aspects of stress. The summary article showed that children and young adults experience similarities in stress except the affects of stress for young adults tend to be more severe on their health as opposed to young children. There were two articles I used that were based on experiments done related to the affects of stress. The journal article i chose was discussing an experiment done on freshman college students in Canada and it focused on the negative ways college students manage stress, such as drinking and using illegal substances. The article that was based on an experiment was the analysis article i chose. This article talked about an experiment done on monkeys, which was able to correlate visceral fat quantity with the amount of social stress the monkey was under. The article is able to connect this experiment with humans in saying that large quantities of visceral fat is often the main cause of heart disease in humans. Overall the articles that I found discussed different affects that stress has on students, whether in the form of experiments done, opinions made, or facts found, all of the articles proved to relate to one another. Jaime Botelho
II. Group Product Overview
Introduction: (1 min) To give a brief introduction to our topic our group is just going to state our research questions and then our individual questions. Then we will briefly explain how we are going to give the information from our research and then show the students how to apply what we taught them.
Presentation: (20 min) Our presentation is in power point format. We will each explain our individual research question and then provide answers to each of our research question based on the research we have done. Kristin will start by first describing what stress is and which parts of the body it can have affect on. Then she will address her research question, "What are the main causes for students stressing out over school?" Then she will answer her research question by listing and explaining the causes of stress. Then we will take about 3 minutes to interact with the class. We will ask them what types of stress they are under. This activity is done to show the students that they are not the only one dealing with stressors. Now we will continue our presentation by Virginia giving her individual research question, "How are students' stressors effectively managed?" Then she will answer her question in detail. Then Jaime will address her question, "What are the affects of stress on the lives of students if it is not properly managed?" Then Jaime will answer her individual question while also giving the positive affects if the stress is managed. This will conclude the presentation portion.
Activity 1: (5-10 min) We will briefly state what this activity entails. Everyone should sit down on the floor and then we will all do three different yoga poses just to demonstrate a brief session. The first pose we will do is cat cow pose and then from this pose we will go into extended puppy pose and then from here we will end at cobra. The first time we do this as a class will just be instructive/ demonstrative. The second time we do these poses we will have yoga music playing in the background to try and help the students relax. This activity is done to apply one stress management techniques Virgina discussed in her portion of the presentation, yoga.
Activity 2: (10 min)
The second activity is going to be another stress management technique Virginia discussed during her presentation, meditation. We will ask the students to find a comfortable place to sit or lay and try to be as relaxed as they can. Then Kristin will instruct them to tense certain muscles, and while they meditate we will have meditation music playing softly. This activity as well as the yoga activity will not only apply the stress management techniques discussed, but it will also show the class that they are capable of coming up with their own techniques too.
Feedback: (5min) We will have a class discussion about any feedback they have on our presentation and/or activities. We will also have them write down any feedback they have on a sheet of paper.
III. Visual Representation
Mind Map
IV. Research Questions and Reference Summaries
Group Research Question: What role does stress play in the lives of students?
Majority Opinion
After researching our issue we have come to the conclusion that stress is an important issue in the lives of students and it is an issue that everyone should be aware of,whether they are a student, a teacher, a parent or an administrator. Stress can have serious affects on students' health and this can be seen through the research that we have done. Many of the articles that we found focused mainly on the importance of stress and the affects that it has. If we ever needed to argue the importance of stress the articles we found would help us argue this point. A student manages his or her stress in accordance to how they were taught when they were younger. If more middle schools and elementary schools participate in stress management techniques then the percentage of students developing health issues because of stress would decrease. We also believe that stress management classes should exist in high school as well as colleges. There are some classes that exist at our University, but students have to pay for them. We believe that since stress amongst students is such an important issue that management classes on stress should be available to all students for free.
Individual Opinions
When we first made a decision about which topic we were going to research, I was strongly suggesting stress in students. I already had an opinion about this issue before beginning research because this is an important part of my life. All throughout my schooling I have been stressed by school work and everything and anything related to school. Just this semester I was told I had gastritis which was caused by too much stress, so this is the reason I chose my individual research question: what are the affects of stress if it is not managed properly. This research project allowed me to research a little more about what was going on with me and some suggestions to manage them. Although, there is a slight possibility that my gastritis is caused by the gall stones I have, but in my opinion it was a combination of everything that I have been going through. I honestly, do not see meditation or yoga as a stress management technique, just because those techniques have proven to personally be unsuccessful for me, but I am sure for others it has proven to work. Overall my opinion is that stress is an important issue in students and if not managed properly one may end up in a lot of pain like me. Jaime Botelho
When we first started working on this project, I had already had an idea of what the effects of stress might be, so I was more interested in the management techniques would be. I found it fascinating that schools were recognizing that their students were stressed out (in my experience, most of the teachers I’ve had have failed to acknowledge their students’ stress). Even more fascinating was the fact that schools were implementing ways in which students are able to alleviate their stress such as yoga before testing or meditation during the school day. I am a big supporter of running or doing some sort of exercise when I am stressed out. I believe that actually getting up and out of the stressful situation can do wonders, and also it refreshes your mind so that when you sit back down to your studying or paper or whatever it is that is stressing you out your mind is refocused. High school has never been able to stress me out as much as college does, so I am new to this stress relieving stuff, but yoga and running seem to be my go-to relief strategies. Virginia Kreger
Upon beginning this project Jaime, Virginia and I were a little indecisive at first as to which topic we wanted to choose. Though after having a night to sleep on it and do some background research on the ideas, we decided on stress involving students. I felt that this was a very relateable topic for myself and for our class. Right away I (ironically) did not feel stressed about presenting this topic to the class since it was not a foreign thing for them. I really enjoyed researching my topic area which was what causes students to become stressed, because I was very interested in what information I was going to find. It was somewhat comforting to find out the many causes of stress, and that it is okay to be stressed as long as you deal with it in a positive way. Also, I found it fasinating to learn what is actually going on inside your body when you stress, because before this project I only had a very basic idea about the stress hormones inside your body. I also enjoyed being able to teach our classmates about stress and then being able to lead them in engaging activities which they can hopefully take and use else where in their lives. Overall I truly enjoyed working on this project, I had a great group to work with and through completing this project I was able to learn new things that I was unsure of or did not know before. By the end of this project I felt a sense of pride because of the resourceful knowledge I had gained through completing of this project. Kristin Orabone
VI. Presentation
Feedback from class:
yoga and meditation are very effective ways of relieving stress
stress can be important in fright or flight situation, without it people tend to be numb
well done
yoga stretched my muscles
meditation was very relaxing
i enjoyed the organization of the presentation
I definitely agree with running to cope with stress
some of the vocab was too informal
how does it relate to schools in RI?
too many ums
was very informative and factual
really liked the meditation techniques
Some of the powerpoint backgrounds made some of the text hard to read
the yoga poses and meditation were very helpful and relaxing
are there any resources that students can find on campus to help deal with stress?
informative
didn't drag on and got right to the point
interesting to see how schools are implementing TM and yoga in the classroom
good move to include ineffective ways for students to deal with stress
that was a very nice activity! nice idea!
nice overview of presentation/expectations
the set up of your project was really good
I enjoyed how you got the class involved, it helped us to understand more clearly
very well done
really like the yoga and meditation
light colored slides
really informative and well organized, good job
should teach more not just present
I was really relaxed in the meditation and will use it in the future
I. Description of Problem or Issue
Our issue is the role that stress plays in the lives of students. Stress is a huge part of our everyday lives and is often seen as a fact of nature. It is defined as any type of force in the outside world that affects the individual physically, mentally and behaviorally. Every person responds to stress differently according to their past experiences and current management. Students experience stress on a daily basis whether it is from their classes, social lives, family lives, or expectations that they may have for themselves. Stress has proven to become a big issue in the lives of students. Many schools participate in stress management techniques to guide their students into a more stress free environment. More schools should be participating in stress management sessions because many students even up to their years in high school do not know the proper way to manage or cope with stress. The majority of schools that are participating in teaching students stress management techniques are elementary and middle school, which allows the students to learn early on in life how to manage stress. What about the high schools students and college students? These are the students that seem to be under the most amount of stress, but yet it is often hard to find stress management techniques offered for free to these students. As a group we wanted to research the main issues of stress such as their causes, management techniques, and both positive and negative effects. We wanted to focus on students of all grade levels as a whole due to the similarities in causes of stress between these grade levels.II. Research Summary
The section of our research for this project which I focused on was what causes students to stress, mainly within the school system. There is no doubt that students stress, the difference is that everyone stresses differently and has their own way of dealing with it. The articles that I used for this research project mainly focused on the causes of stress, and why these stress simulators are causing students to stress. The editorial article I found focused mainly on the causes of stress from tests, family, jobs, peer pressure, school related issues, etc. It also touched upon the fact that the root of stress is caused by the environment which the student is becoming stressed in. This article also expressed how stress for students is mainly due to the fact that they are trying to balance academic and social demands from school. The NY Times magazine article that I found talked about how stress within school is mainly caused by long school days/ classes, and over crowded classrooms. It also explained how many students are becoming more stressed in some cases than their parents and also that they are learning to stress from their parents. In the scholarly article explained how researchers are now using student stress surveys and other forms of evaluations to research and determine what causes someone to stress. This article also talked about how freshmen are the key group who are prone to stress because they are transitioning into a new environment. The summary- ERIC- which I used explained how not all students experience the same negative thoughts and feelings when stress, and how this is related to what is causing a student to stress as well. The final article/summary which I was allow to freely choose was about how the impact of more homework in school and the demand of honorary activities (such as the honor roll) are really causing students to become stressed. This article talked about some specific examples of what is being done to reduce the stress on these students.Kristin Orabone
My section of research focused on the effective management of stress used by students and teachers. The articles that I have chosen to summarize mostly focus on the suggested strategies students are supposed to use to combat the stress they feel. It is evident to anyone who has been a student; school is a very stressful time. Sometimes students either don’t know how or don’t want to spend time trying to relieve their stress, which ends up in a situation that is not beneficial to the student. My opinion article was written by a Syracuse University student who believed that the typical stress relieving strategies did not seem to work on the average college student. Instead, the author reported that he had found that most students he knew would rather punch something than take a peaceful walk. The article I found from Newsweek reported that a middle school in the Washington D.C. area was implementing a meditation strategy to help prevent further violent behavior. In this article it was mentioned that many studies have found that meditation provides students with a better sense of self and resulted in less bullying and higher test scores. Another article also supports the idea of teaching students healthy stress relieving strategies was found in NEA Today and it described the different ways teachers helped their students get rid of their stress. From yoga before tests to bringing coloring books for after, teachers found that even the smallest change will help students to alleviate their stress. An ERIC digest article described the reasons students might feel overwhelmed or stressed, as well as ways to help students reduce the stress they may be feeling. One suggestion in this article that has been found to be helpful was to reduce the feeling of one’s helplessness over one’s own academic performance. If students feel that their success is in their own hands, it has been found that they will feel less stressed out. In the second ERIC digest article that I summarized, it described the different ways (either positive or negative) in which gifted students can handle their stress. Such positive ways were going for a run or making to-do lists, and negative ways of handling stress were escaping through drugs and alcohol or setting one’s standards very low to avoid failing. Overall, the articles all had the same message: there are helpful and destructive ways to handle stress, each person has a different way of dealing with their stress, but there are some ways that are proven to just make matters worse. Virginia Kreger
My section of research focused on the affects that stress has in the lives of students. The different health issues associated with the affects of stress emphasize just how important an issue, stress is for students. The articles that I used for my research paper mainly focus on some sort of affect that stress has caused either on people as a whole or specifically children or young adults. The summary article that I used from ERIC proved to be helpful when trying to figure out if there was any significant difference in the affects of stress for young adults as opposed to children; it also was the only article that talked about some positive aspects of stress. The summary article showed that children and young adults experience similarities in stress except the affects of stress for young adults tend to be more severe on their health as opposed to young children. There were two articles I used that were based on experiments done related to the affects of stress. The journal article i chose was discussing an experiment done on freshman college students in Canada and it focused on the negative ways college students manage stress, such as drinking and using illegal substances. The article that was based on an experiment was the analysis article i chose. This article talked about an experiment done on monkeys, which was able to correlate visceral fat quantity with the amount of social stress the monkey was under. The article is able to connect this experiment with humans in saying that large quantities of visceral fat is often the main cause of heart disease in humans. Overall the articles that I found discussed different affects that stress has on students, whether in the form of experiments done, opinions made, or facts found, all of the articles proved to relate to one another. Jaime Botelho
II. Group Product Overview
Introduction: (1 min) To give a brief introduction to our topic our group is just going to state our research questions and then our individual questions. Then we will briefly explain how we are going to give the information from our research and then show the students how to apply what we taught them.Presentation: (20 min) Our presentation is in power point format. We will each explain our individual research question and then provide answers to each of our research question based on the research we have done. Kristin will start by first describing what stress is and which parts of the body it can have affect on. Then she will address her research question, "What are the main causes for students stressing out over school?" Then she will answer her research question by listing and explaining the causes of stress. Then we will take about 3 minutes to interact with the class. We will ask them what types of stress they are under. This activity is done to show the students that they are not the only one dealing with stressors. Now we will continue our presentation by Virginia giving her individual research question, "How are students' stressors effectively managed?" Then she will answer her question in detail. Then Jaime will address her question, "What are the affects of stress on the lives of students if it is not properly managed?" Then Jaime will answer her individual question while also giving the positive affects if the stress is managed. This will conclude the presentation portion.
Activity 1: (5-10 min) We will briefly state what this activity entails. Everyone should sit down on the floor and then we will all do three different yoga poses just to demonstrate a brief session. The first pose we will do is cat cow pose and then from this pose we will go into extended puppy pose and then from here we will end at cobra. The first time we do this as a class will just be instructive/ demonstrative. The second time we do these poses we will have yoga music playing in the background to try and help the students relax. This activity is done to apply one stress management techniques Virgina discussed in her portion of the presentation, yoga.
Activity 2: (10 min)
The second activity is going to be another stress management technique Virginia discussed during her presentation, meditation. We will ask the students to find a comfortable place to sit or lay and try to be as relaxed as they can. Then Kristin will instruct them to tense certain muscles, and while they meditate we will have meditation music playing softly. This activity as well as the yoga activity will not only apply the stress management techniques discussed, but it will also show the class that they are capable of coming up with their own techniques too.
Feedback: (5min) We will have a class discussion about any feedback they have on our presentation and/or activities. We will also have them write down any feedback they have on a sheet of paper.
III. Visual Representation
Mind MapIV. Research Questions and Reference Summaries
Group Research Question: What role does stress play in the lives of students?V. Group Reaction/Opinion(s) about Issue
Majority OpinionAfter researching our issue we have come to the conclusion that stress is an important issue in the lives of students and it is an issue that everyone should be aware of,whether they are a student, a teacher, a parent or an administrator. Stress can have serious affects on students' health and this can be seen through the research that we have done. Many of the articles that we found focused mainly on the importance of stress and the affects that it has. If we ever needed to argue the importance of stress the articles we found would help us argue this point. A student manages his or her stress in accordance to how they were taught when they were younger. If more middle schools and elementary schools participate in stress management techniques then the percentage of students developing health issues because of stress would decrease. We also believe that stress management classes should exist in high school as well as colleges. There are some classes that exist at our University, but students have to pay for them. We believe that since stress amongst students is such an important issue that management classes on stress should be available to all students for free.
Individual Opinions
When we first made a decision about which topic we were going to research, I was strongly suggesting stress in students. I already had an opinion about this issue before beginning research because this is an important part of my life. All throughout my schooling I have been stressed by school work and everything and anything related to school. Just this semester I was told I had gastritis which was caused by too much stress, so this is the reason I chose my individual research question: what are the affects of stress if it is not managed properly. This research project allowed me to research a little more about what was going on with me and some suggestions to manage them. Although, there is a slight possibility that my gastritis is caused by the gall stones I have, but in my opinion it was a combination of everything that I have been going through. I honestly, do not see meditation or yoga as a stress management technique, just because those techniques have proven to personally be unsuccessful for me, but I am sure for others it has proven to work. Overall my opinion is that stress is an important issue in students and if not managed properly one may end up in a lot of pain like me. Jaime Botelho
When we first started working on this project, I had already had an idea of what the effects of stress might be, so I was more interested in the management techniques would be. I found it fascinating that schools were recognizing that their students were stressed out (in my experience, most of the teachers I’ve had have failed to acknowledge their students’ stress). Even more fascinating was the fact that schools were implementing ways in which students are able to alleviate their stress such as yoga before testing or meditation during the school day. I am a big supporter of running or doing some sort of exercise when I am stressed out. I believe that actually getting up and out of the stressful situation can do wonders, and also it refreshes your mind so that when you sit back down to your studying or paper or whatever it is that is stressing you out your mind is refocused. High school has never been able to stress me out as much as college does, so I am new to this stress relieving stuff, but yoga and running seem to be my go-to relief strategies. Virginia Kreger
Upon beginning this project Jaime, Virginia and I were a little indecisive at first as to which topic we wanted to choose. Though after having a night to sleep on it and do some background research on the ideas, we decided on stress involving students. I felt that this was a very relateable topic for myself and for our class. Right away I (ironically) did not feel stressed about presenting this topic to the class since it was not a foreign thing for them. I really enjoyed researching my topic area which was what causes students to become stressed, because I was very interested in what information I was going to find. It was somewhat comforting to find out the many causes of stress, and that it is okay to be stressed as long as you deal with it in a positive way. Also, I found it fasinating to learn what is actually going on inside your body when you stress, because before this project I only had a very basic idea about the stress hormones inside your body. I also enjoyed being able to teach our classmates about stress and then being able to lead them in engaging activities which they can hopefully take and use else where in their lives. Overall I truly enjoyed working on this project, I had a great group to work with and through completing this project I was able to learn new things that I was unsure of or did not know before. By the end of this project I felt a sense of pride because of the resourceful knowledge I had gained through completing of this project. Kristin Orabone
VI. Presentation
Feedback from class:
Presentation